#274

Hello, and whatcha know?
First order of business... pictures of my electric bike are a bit overdue, I think. So here 'tis.


Jo helped me wrap the battery up in canvas that I butchered from my old guitar gig bag, so that bag can continue to follow me on my adventures, even if I don't play in bands anymore.


It's sitting on what used to be our breadbox, which as you can imagine never saw too many adventures... unless you count making toast. I pretty much ride this thing everywhere now, which is greatly increasing my odds of kissing the pavement, so I'm thinking about getting some knee pads. A lot of cars misjudge my speed and pull out in front of me, since I now travel at twice the speed of your average middle-aged dude on a bike.
I'm still working on my music video. I needed to do some screen tests to try out my TV head, so I worked that footage into a little video for you.


I used a song fragment that I wrote and sped it up, the result of which is quite ridiculous. Jo says my song is catchy, which was a compliment the first time she said it. But she looks less and less pleased the more she finds herself singing it. Catchy like the flu, I guess.
And last but certainly not least, we've got some new designs listed on etsy, so if you're not too busy trying to erase my song from your head with a taser, stop by and check them out.

-Dylan

#273

Hi, all.
Since we have these cool paper dolls now, I thought I'd try my hand at a little animation using them. Maybe I got a little carried away. So if you're easily shocked or offended, this might not be for you.
I've been meaning to take some video of my electric bike to share with you as well, but my right hand is so cramped up now from working the computer mouse for this last little video that it will have to wait.
Hope you enjoy the video!


-Dylan

#272

Hi there.
Good to see ya.
There are drinks and chips on the table.

My son and I are back from our two week vacation at my parent's place in Satellite Beach, Florida. We had a glorious time. My brother and his wife and two girls were there as well. My nieces have extraordinary imaginations, so we played talking games for hours which usually started with "pretend this is a sword" and ended with me playing a southern belle.
"Girly, girly, girly, curly, curly curly."

My brother is in the Air Force, so we were able to rent a surfboard and an ocean kayak from Patrick Air Force base for next to nothing. Surfing with military prop planes and helicopters landing on the other side of the dune gave it an Apocalypse Now quality.
"Charlie don't surf!"

We came back on Jimmy's 16th birthday to a home in desperate need of an air conditioner in the window. I had it buried somewhere in the garage, so Jo had been living with the windows open, and getting to know our neighbors better as the smell of burnt coffee or the sounds of an argument drifted in the open windows.

-Dylan

#271

Hello, friends, family, framily and fiends.
I probably should have mentioned this earlier, but we'll be taking down all of our made to order pieces from our etsy shop at some point on Saturday, June 18th. They won't be gone forever, just for a couple of weeks while my son and I visit family in Florida. So if there is something that we have currently listed that you've had your eye on, better snatch it up before Saturday! Jo won't be coming to Florida with us since this trip combines both air travel and Florida in the summertime. . .two of Jo's favorites! Instead Jo will be here in the relatively cool air, I assume sobbing with loneliness and renaming the business Cart Without a Horse. Or is she the horse and I'm the cart? She will be working on some one-of-a-kind pieces while I'm gone that I've already sewn for her, so look for those in the coming weeks.

In other news, my electric bike kit is here! As soon as it arrived, I hooked everything up and just threw all of the components in my giant wire baskets. I wanted to make sure everything worked before I spent time making it look nice. So here's what it looked like for the first few days as I rode it around. . .


I want my son to be able to ride it too, but sharing my bike is not off to a good start. The one thing I told him to do was to turn it off before getting on or off the thing. Sure enough he forgot, and while dismounting it he twisted the throttle and popped a wheelie, sending the 16 pound $500 battery tumbling out of the basket onto the concrete. Lucky for him (and me) nothing was damaged.
So now I'm starting to set the bike up into its finished form. Jo helped me wrap the battery in some black canvas that I cut from an old bag that I used to carry my guitar stuff in around to gigs with me.


I love using materials that I have a history with. And lets not forget the bread box that I've cut the battery stand out of, which is shown here without the braces underneath that I still need to make.



So far I've explored several country roads nearby that were too hilly for me to tackle before. You don't even feel like you're going uphill with this hub motor doing most of the work. So if you've been thinking of getting one, you should do it! You don't have to get such an expensive battery if you plan on taking short trips. Just remember to turn it off before dismounting!

-Dylan

#270

I've been holding onto this little secret for a while, but I guess it's ok to talk about now since I just spotted this behind the scenes video on youtube. . .

Some of our art is going to be in a Canon commercial starring Ron Howard! You can spot one of our Paisley Cat at 1:18 of the video, Gerard the Goat at 2:26, and Katie Pillar on the desk by Ron Howard at 2:42. I think I spotted our witch too up on the shelf, but I didn't get a good look at it. The full length commercial, which isn't out yet, is being directed by Dante Ariola, who has done some amazing commercials in the past including the VW Black Beetle commercial that debuted during the Super Bowl.

Jo and I may just sit around the house working most of the time, but at least our creations get to go out and have adventures.

-Dylan

#269

When Jo designed our paper dolls, the queen obviously wasn't going to fit on one page. When we got the two pages printed the first time, we made a mistake in the size of one of them, so they didn't match up when assembling it. We quickly fixed the problem, but we were left with 20 prints that we had no use for.


So there was the challenge. . .find a use for them instead of just throwing them in the recycling bin. So I took the head and the example picture of the queen and made this. . .


But that wasn't weird enough for me, so I took 4 of the prints and created the spider queen. . .


"Off to my web!"
-Dylan

#268

I better tell this story before I forget it. Our son, Jimmy, went to the senior prom over the weekend. He's only a sophomore, but his girlfriend is a senior. If it weren't for Jo, he would have been completely unprepared.

Jo: Are you going to get her a corsage to match your boutonnière?
Jimmy: What's a boutonnière?
Jo: It's the flower that goes on your lapel.
Jimmy: What language are you speaking?


In the end, Jo made the corsage out of crepe paper streamers and antique buttons, proving she can make just about anything out of virtually nothing. She's like MacGyver minus the mullet. Anyway, Jimmy and his girlfriend arrived at their friend's house for a pre-prom party and realized they had forgotten the paper corsage. So Jimmy gave me the address, I google mapped it and headed out. It wasn't hard to find. There were balloons leading me right to where I expected it to be. I asked the gathering of proud parents on the porch, "Is this Megan's house?"
"Yup, everyone's inside taking pictures."
The door was open, so I let myself in and looked for Jimmy among the crowd of football players in tuxes, girls all done up for the big night, and parents taking time off from appearing in the L.L. Bean catalogue. But I didn't spot Jimmy anywhere.
"Has anyone seen Jimmy? Jimmy Curry?"
"Wait, don't take the picture yet, we're missing someone. Jimmy who?"
"Um. . . is this Megan's house?"
"No. . ."
That's when I realized I was standing in a stranger's house uninvited holding a paper flower. Later I thought about all the things that had gone wrong to put me there.

1. Jimmy forgot the corsage.
2. I was given the wrong street number.
3. The number I was given did exist, so google maps couldn't catch the mistake.
4. There were balloons leading right to where I was expecting the house to be.
5. The parents out front didn't know whose porch they were standing on either.

I eventually found the right house about half a mile a way. The rest of the night went off without a hitch. They're pretty careful around here. All the students had to pass a breathalyzer test to get into prom, which is probably a good idea. I remember when a group of prom kids came to stay at the resort I was working at about 10 years ago. They went on a drunken rampage, smashing golf carts and windows until the cops came and rounded them up. The cops had no problem identifying the troublemakers. It's hard to blend in with the tourists when you have a boutonnière on your lapel s'il vous plaît.
Wait. What?
-Dylan

#267

So...what have I been up to since I stopped writing these newsletters? Well, much to the dismay of the neighbors who peek in our garage every time the garage door opens, I've made a guillotine.


I'm slowly working on my next puppet music video, and I wanted a real show stopper for the finale.


Much of this guillotine is made out of recycled wood that used to be Jo's desk top shelf for her art supplies.

Originally I thought I'd paint the whole thing brown when I was done, but this was the first cheerfully decorated guillotine I could remember seeing, so I left it as is.



The blade, which is actually quite dull, had a previous life as the lid to our bread box, which looked like this. . .



I hate to throw stuff away if I can reuse it. You'll be seeing the bamboo cutting board part of that bread box soon, when my electric bike kit finally gets here and I outfit my bike with various bits and bobs that would make Sanford and Son proud. The giant 16 lb. lithium battery for the bike is already here, so we're just waiting on the slow boat from China to bring my motor. Then I'll be able to leave my car parked while I zip past gas stations on my electric bike, leaving puzzled onlookers wondering, "Was that a bread box?"

-Dylan

#266

Hello, fans, friends, and family.
As the subject line may have already tipped you off, this will be the last newsletter that I'll be sending out. . .in email form anyway. You may have noticed that these newsletters, that used to arrive in your inbox like clockwork, have petered out. I know exactly what the problem is, so I may as well tell you and try to fix it. These newsletters started way back in 2005, a year when the word "blog" still confused the spell checker. Since then, people have been steadily requesting to be on the mailing list, making it a GIANT group of people. And that fact alone makes it statistically more likely that someone is going want to be removed from the list each time I send out a newsletter. I'd like to say that this doesn't mess with my head, but at a certain point, it gets hard to share when I consistently get back, "Please remove me from your mailing list!" Obviously, I'm not talking about any of you. If you're reading this, you're among the silent majority that has appreciated me keeping you in the loop. And some of you have not been so silent, and I appreciate all of the kind words and encouragement you've given me over the years.

But it's 2011 now, and even grandma and grandpa know what a blog is. You probably didn't realize it, but these newsletters have also been mirrored on my blog for the last few years. So I think that will be the best format to continue sharing what's going on in the cart before the horse house. I'll be able to write again without feeling like I'm bugging someone somewhere.

I had an "ah-ha" moment while sorting the recycling that clued me into this subtle difference between writing a newsletter to email and writing a blog. I was removing a bunch of unread newspapers from their wet plastic bags and grumbling to myself, "Why am I getting the paper all of a sudden? I don't remember signing up for it. I should call the newspaper and get them to stop sending them because this is just getting to be a nuisance on recycling day. I know where to get the news!"
You see, I constantly have the BBC news in my headphones. They're more focused on world news, and their British accents give everything an ominous 1984 tone that I appreciate. So in that moment I realized that to some people, my newsletters are like those soggy unwanted newspapers on the lawn. So from now on, I'll be more like the BBC news. If you want to know what's going on, just stop by and visit me here. . .

Thanks for reading.
-Dylan

#265

Hello, time travelers.

I've made another ridiculous video for you.

It uses another surviving tape recording of me from about 1979 or so.
The TV you hear in the background was in the room with me when I recorded myself. I didn't use any of the audio from the cartoon.
When we were kids, my brother and I had a G-Force club based on the Battle of the Planets cartoon. I don't know how I ended up being Tiny at the bottom of the totem pole,
but in another clip I brag that Tiny has the most tricks, so hey. . .what does the 37 year old me know about anything?

And here, as always, is the art.

Some is new
and some you know.
Take a view
or take 'em home.

-Dylan

#264

This is a short one.
I promise to be brief.
We have a shelf full of Halloween clad friends that have been looking at Jo sideways for the last few months as if to say, "Why are we here?"
Well that is a good question, one we all must ask from time to time. But as far as these Halloween honeys go, they'd be much happier there with you than here with us, so we're offering them for 30% off with free shipping. This offer is good through March 1st and is for the in stock Halloween items only. Follow the picture link below and you'll be able to click on the picture to see each item's listing. Just use the coupon code "HALLOWEEN" when checking out.



-Dylan

Hi all!
We have added a new member to our little family. She's living up on Jo's shelf. Here she is. . .

And of course the rest of the art can be found here.We just celebrated Jo's birthday back in Lincoln City on the Oregon coast. We had a relaxing time there staying in this bed and breakfast place that Jo's mom got for us for the night. But I think if they tried to squeezed one more nautical knick knack in there, the whole place would sink into the dune. There was a pool table in the living room that kept us entertained, until we gave up on the sticks and played the hand version of pool/air hockey that always results in bruised fingernails. We're still kids after all.
In other news, Kim Chernecky recently interviewed us for her blog. So if you're not already tired of hearing me talk, go check it out. There's a bit of our history as working artists discussed in it, so if you're curious about our story you can find it here.
Happy birthday to Jo, and if you have a birthday this year or possibly next year, happy birthday to you as well!

-Dylan

#262

Why hello.
Here's the art.

What should you do when opportunity knocks? I guess it depends on what you see through the peephole. Jo was approached recently about licensing her designs for mass production overseas and national distribution of those CartBeforeTheHorse reproductions. We made lists of pros and cons, we wrote to other more experienced artists, and finally Jo and I arm wrestled. The arm wrestling was just for the fun of it though, because we both pretty much reached the same decision to not open the door on this opportunity. In 2003, when we started our little art business, we wrote this simple explanation of who we were. . .

"We are a mom and dad business, a two person
company of artists. We make the kind of art we'd
hang on our walls, then we open our doors to you.
We call ourselves CartBeforeTheHorse
because we're always getting ahead of ourselves.
All of our creations are made one at a time.
We make them with our own hands,
since these are the only hands we have."

This is a sentiment that we couldn't abandon easily. We're not against reproductions, but we'd prefer it if our hands were the ones to make them. So this is the road we're presently headed down. We've gotten some of our art printed on fabric, and we're figuring out cool stuff to make out of those prints, like this Little Red Riding Hood necklace.


Jo is also working on paper dolls that will be available soon for you to put together yourself. We're excited, so hopefully you all will be as well.
So. . . what have we learned today? When opportunity knocks, sometimes the best answer is, "Dave's not here."

-Dylan

#261

Is it almost Valentine's Day again?
When are us guys going to catch a break?
Here are our Valentine friends. . .


You can find them here. . .
Our garage is the man cave. Who else would want it? With bikes parked, garbage and recycling cans guarding the door, a crusty mower waiting for spring, and boxes upon boxes of the past. Who wants this junky room?
I do. I'll plant a flag in it. It's mine.
Here's something made in the man cave recently.


I'm working on my music video, and this contraption holds a Christmas bulb up to my video camera. It gives it a fish eye lens type effect, but with those scratches and imperfections that you just can't get from using digital effects. Plus, I can spend hours pulling faces into that Christmas bulb. I can make my nose big enough to smell cheese steaks in Philly.

-Dylan

#260

Jello,
Nice to see ya.
We finally have some new pieces finished and listed on etsy.
If the link doesn't work, just dial 911 and let them know you want to see some art. They should be more than helpful, and may even offer you a ride in a real police car!

Most days, Jo is at her table painting, and I'm at my rickety folding table in front of the computer stuffing microscopic doll arms and watching Netflix. Once in while we'll scratch our heads and wonder "when was my last day off?" So in answer to that question, I've been trying to make time recently for my hobbies. Yes, the puppet set has been unpacked, and I'm working on repairing some damage caused in its relocation from the coast to here. I didn't feed the set to the wood chipper as I had previously threatened because I've got one more music video in me I'm afraid. I'm doing something different for the puppet heads in each video, and this one will have little TV heads with ipod touches inside to supply the screen. Here's a picture of what it might look like minus the ipods. . .


I'm going to try to get more movement out of these puppets this time. I want the puppets to bleed their stuffing all over the stage. I want amplifiers smashed and heads rolling on the ground. ROCK & ROLL!!!. . .puppetry. I know. Puppets aren't very tough sounding. But when you make dolls for a living, working with puppets is living on the edge.

-Dylan

#259

Hello, all.
I hope you had a good Christmas.
We had a fine time, but we're back to work now. You'll find us on our website, and etsy.
We made a few home-made presents for family this year, as you might expect. Jo's brother, Andrew, asked me several weeks ago if I wanted to help him record the Beatles' song "When I'm 64" for my in-laws. His step-dad, Steve, just turned 64 this year, and Andrew sang it at their wedding years ago, so it has some significance to them. It's not my favorite Beatles song, being more of a John guy myself, but I think we made it work. We passed the 16 track recorder around so that Steve's sister, Kate Power, and her husband, Steve Einhorn, could sing and play a bit of banjo and guitar on it as well. We even talked Jo and our daughter, Kaity, into singing a few lines in the last verse. Our son wouldn't sing, but we put the squeeze on him tight enough to get a few whistles out of him for the song. So if you're interested in hearing it, you can download it using this link. If you click on it and it doesn't download, try right clicking on it, then choosing "save target as."

When we played it for them on Christmas, we were hoping they'd recognize the singing voices as their family, but they thought it was the Beatles until they heard some of the lyrics changed. We got rid of "Vera, Chuck, and Dave" and replaced it with their grandkids, "Jimmy and Kaity Rae." Once they realized what they were listening to, they were brought to tears. Score!

Here are the credits, in order of appearance:

Bass and lead guitar-Dylan Curry
Drums, vocals, and guitar-Andrew James
Banjo and vocals- Kate Power
Guitar, vocals, and "mouth trombone"-Steve Einhorn
Vocals-Kaity Curry
Vocals-Jo James
Whistling-Jimmy Curry
Vocals-Yellena James

Hope you enjoy it. . .
-Dylan

#258

Hello, everyone.
This is a newsletter first. . .
No links in this email to our art.
Why, you ask?
Because I'm hiding them until after Christmas,
and I'm not even going to give you hot and cold clues.
We are thankful to be booked up until after Christmas production-wise.
Thank you very much to everyone that kept us so busy
this year. We appreciate your support.

So without any art to sell, what do I write?
I sat down to write some silly parody of
The Night Before Christmas.
What came out instead sounded more like
The Raven and was kind of. . .stupid.
But friends, I'll tell you plainly,
I am not above being stupid.
So please enjoy. . .
. . .a piece of work too dumb to destroy. . .

"A Magicless Christmas"

Once upon a merry Cringle
As I sat there eating Pringles
With twinkling stars upon my set
It was David Letterman
And David Arquette

When the ceiling did open
And down came a ladder
And I jumped up and was like,
"What's the matter?"

Then from the attic
Who should appear?
But six white rats
With etsy beards

They winked at me once
Which was a bit off-putting
Then they scampered away
Like they found some pudding

Another glorious Christmas ends
Good night
God's speed
Good luck
Amen

-Dylan

#257

Hello, everyone.
We have some new pieces on the website since I wrote to you last, so be sure to check that out. . .



I hope you all had a tasty Thanksgiving on Thursday, and continue to enjoy the leftovers. Here's a tip from Captain Hobo for enjoying your leftovers . . . you can roll just about anything up in a tortilla and eat it with one hand, leaving your other hand free to set a fire in garbage can, thumb a ride, or play the harmonica (not recommended.)
We celebrated Thanksgiving in Lincoln City on the coast with Jo's folks. We stayed in a trailer in their yard, which is their guest room. The bed is several inches from the ceiling, so I'm recommending to Jo that she wear a helmet next time. I tried to keep count of how many times she bumped her head, but it's difficult to count when you're nursing your own concussion.

-Dylan

I'm back!
Sorry to have been gone so long.
We finally have some new pieces listed both on etsy and our website.
Click away. . .



Our daughter will be coming home soon for one of the longest Thanksgiving weekends I've ever seen scheduled, about 9 days long. I say she's coming "home" but she doesn't call this house home. She calls it "my parents' house" since she never lived here. But we want it to feel like the home she knew before we moved, so we've transformed the craft room/ junk room/ guest room into something that resembles her old room. We painstakingly peeled the springtime themed decals off the walls and painted over the worst shade of pink ever mixed in a paint can, choosing instead a nice off-white. We put up a few decorations, and suddenly it became the best looking room in the house. To be honest, the other bedrooms weren't giving it much competition. Would you believe that our bedroom isn't decorated in the slightest? I know. I'm surprised too. It kind of looks like a room in a halfway house, without any art on the walls and a cheap particle board dresser in the corner. I guess after living and breathing art the rest of the day, Jo just wants somewhere void of all art to collapse and recharge. Our son's room is definitely no match for our daughter's new room. It looks like someone placed a bomb inside the dirty cloths hamper.

-Dylan

#255

Hi, all.
Here are two great places to find us: our website and etsy.

I hope you all had a memorable Halloween. This might be the last Halloween our son will go trick-or-treating. He's 15, so he's just a growth spurt away from scaring people into turning off their porch lights, which is how I knew it was time to retire from trick-or-treating when I was a teenager. Jo made his costume this year, like so many costumes before. He was a lumberjack, complete with a homemade beard and paper mache ax. Here's a picture. . .


This is the first time we've lived in a neighborhood that had an actual shot of attracting costumed candy beggars. We've always lived in places hidden from the road or off the beaten path, but we're in the suburbs now. The number of solicitors we've had ringing our doorbell in the last few months was the first indication that we'd better stock up on candy for Halloween. We did in fact get enough trick-or-treaters to satisfy us and drive our dog crazy, but the serious candy collectors went straight for the rich neighborhood around the corner. All the streets leading into it were lined with cars parked on both sides. Shameless! I could hardly find a spot to drop off our own group of kids.

-Dylan